The Geranium Window

By Beatrice MacNeil

In the fictional village of Rocky Point, Cape Breton, just after WWII, the Briar family keeps a secret. Locked in his room, Joseph Briar, a child with visible and non-visible disabilities, is hidden from the community. And what Alfie Johns discovers through Joseph’s window will lead him to love and a future framing beauty in photographs. Harkening back to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Beatrice MacNeil reveals the destructive power of shame and the redemptive power of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Breakwater Books Ltd.
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781550816686

Beatrice MacNeil

BEATRICE MACNEIL is the bestselling author of Where White Horses Gallop, which was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award; Butterflies Dance in the Dark; Keeper of Tides; The Geranium Window; and her short story collection, The Moonlight Skater. She received the Tic Butler Award for outstanding contribution to Cape Breton writing and culture, and has won the Dartmouth Book Award on three occasions. The Girl He Left Behind is her fifth novel. Beatrice MacNeil lives in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. >

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the

GERANIUM

WINDOW

Beatrice MacNeil

P.O. Box 2188, St. John’s, NL, Canada, A1C 6E6

WWW.BREAKWATERBOOKS.COM

COPYRIGHT © 2016 Beatrice MacNeil

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

MacNeil, Beatrice, 1945-, author

The geranium window / Beatrice MacNeil.

isbn 978-1-55081-661-7 (paperback)

I. Title.

PS8575.N43G47 2016 C813’.54 C2016-905775-5

eBook: tikaebooks.com

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We acknowledge the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador through the Department of Tourism, Culture and Recreation for our publishing activities.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA.

Breakwater Books is committed to choosing papers and materials for our books that help to protect our environment. To this end, this book is printed on a recycled paper that is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council®.

IN LOVING MEMORY

of my cherished friend and neighbour, Clark, and the summer days and winter nights spent on the Lake Road in Lower L’Ardoise, Cape Breton.

part

ONE

1

THE FIRST TIME he saw him, the boy was naked. It was a Sunday. The small room Alfie Johns looked into was stark but clean, stripped of all the necessities a young boy banks on for memories: a poster or two, his first poem, a baseball bat, a pair of dirty socks, a hockey-card collection, an assortment of comic books.

The wooden walls were in identical scale to the floor, a pale green hue like new grass. A row of nails along the back wall supported a sparse wardrobe: a pair of pants, a blue plaid shirt, a sweater with arm patches, a pair of pant braces, a worn brown belt coiled up like a cinnamon roll. No dress-up wear. No shiny shoes. A chipped white chamber pail, with a red rim along the cover, sat in the corner of the room. The smell of disinfectant fermented the air.

In the middle of the floor, Joseph Briar cupped in his closed fists the rhythm he was pounding on a makeshift drum, a hollowed-out tree stump with an animal hide tied around its circumference by a rope. He was elf-like in size for a boy of twelve, with a short stubby nose spreading across his pale face. His dark hair was cropped close to his head with several dents running in crooked lines, caused no doubt by the razor’s teeth biting into his skull when he had protested. A permanent droop to his bottom lip the appearance of a fat worm folded in two. The slimness of his body forced his ribs to protrude. He reminded Alfie of a character from a children’s book.

He remained sightless to his surroundings, his eyes closed while he pounded on his drum, a stream of pure, uncensored sexual rhapsody. Beneath the cave in his chest, the small drum snuggled close like another heart. The drum song sparked a fire in his slight bones. His streaked head swayed from side to side. A wounded butterfly about to land. There was no way of knowing if Joseph had names for the sounds he produced. Perhaps words were unnecessary; the birds outside his window sang without a syllable.

Like the Greek god Pan, the bearer of the mystical, he sits in his twisted limbs waiting for noises. The mystery of his condition in itself may have caused this unfinished child of God to not grow any bigger. He appeared much wiser than the schoolboys who came to stare in stunned curiosity at him, by invitation of his older brother, Arthur, who charged a quarter for a glimpse through the window.

Joseph watched for birds he never knew by name, but they did not watch for him. They sang their songs, then flew away. He never went outdoors. Few people even knew the Briars had this third child.

Fourteen-year-old Alfie, a school mate of Joseph’s older siblings, Anntell and Arthur, appeared at his window without invitation, with music coming from between his teeth. He was alone, and when he smiled down at Joseph, there was left-over music still on his mouth.

Hello, he said to Joseph. I heard the beat of your drum.

Joseph listened in silence. He was not accustomed to window voices that spoke directly to him. The others who came just laughed or stared. Perhaps out of fear at what a quarter could produce, or under threat from Arthur Briar that they keep their mouths shut or he would deal with them.

Joseph Briar, born of original shame, the product of an old sperm and a soft egg; his stern, sixty-one-year-old father laid down the fundamental lie. He and Rosie, his much younger wife, had two children only— Anntell and Arthur. This hard rule, this telling deceit, set down by Duncan Briar, was not to be taken lightly. There was no room in the life of a man of his position for any grotesque accident between the sheets. He cursed himself for not having taken the necessary precautions sooner. Instead, shortly after, he had himself severed and tied in a New York hospital. He explained to his wife angrily, I had no choice. I can’t trust the delicacies of a woman’s body not to leak out another child. But Duncan Briar did not anticipate the cost of that first lie, the cost his family would pay for that deception.

Alfie Johns knew something about abandonment. He had found, by accident, a letter in the Bible of Bertha Johns, the woman who reared him as her son. It had been written by his birth mother. Childless, Bertha and Wilfred Johns had agreed to take him for a year and possible adoption, if she, the mother, would have no contact with the child.

The weight in Alfie’s shoulders spread throughout his body. He felt much older than his years as he stood in the grey day surrounded by the green snarled arms of the trees. He knew instinctively the feeling of separation, but the separation Joseph Briar was living came from within his own walls. Alfie understood the rules here: this was it for Joseph Briar. But as he watched the fragile boy pull himself up to the window ledge, he sensed something had changed in both their worlds.

Alfie knew he had to see Joseph again. The desire became a yearning for a dangerous mission; the dare of having a classmate sneak you the answers to an unexpected test, the image of the teacher’s pleated, white hands pulling your paper from your desk, and your zero rolling out into your palm. But this one was different. Arthur Briar, full of sermon and one quarter down, could be right around the corner.

And only last week, as Alfie had his hands tucked securely between his legs and his ecstasy mapped out in his head, his adopted mother had come into his room and reminded him to say his prayers before he got too tired. He smiled as the image of Anntell Briar’s face slid deeper under his cotton sheet. He had another reason to be interested in the Briar family, now that he knew this young boy was real.

The air was laden with moisture on his second visit to Joseph Briar, a forerunner of the heavy rain forecast for the late-spring morning. Alfie turned up his collar before he took another step towards the big house engulfed in freshly wounded limbs. Joseph’s room was situated at the far corner of the grey three-storey house standing well back, almost hidden, from the road. It appeared to have been added on at a distance from the rest.

He knew the Briars were in church on Sunday mornings; clumsy Arthur, no doubt, throwing a quarter from his commerce reluctantly into the collection plate. He smiled when he heard the thumping sounds that floated out from the open window with its faded, rolled-up blind. The row of geranium plants in tin cans on the ledge resembled a line of fat soldiers waiting for inspection.

Alfie watched the boy as his hands rested on the floor. Beside him, rolled up in a ball, were a pair of cotton shorts and a striped short-sleeved sweater he had removed. He lifted his head slowly and looked towards the sound outside his window. Alfie ran his mouth organ along his sleeve and stuffed it back into his shirt pocket as Joseph’s twisted body unfolded slowly in a spastic gesture of painful grace. Joseph pushed himself up by his elbows and stood awkwardly in the middle of the room. He swayed on his turned-out feet for balance. He took one step on his bird-like legs, his thin arms held up in the manner of an infant who wanted to be held.

Alfie stood in deep silence. A murder of crows in the distance cawed loudly to one another. He watched the excitement fill up in the round dark eyes of the boy’s pasty face. Joseph took a few more steps toward the window with his arms still outstretched. His testicles hung like a child’s crude clay model about to crumble. Alfie watched him approach with a crooked grin on his face, smeared with a tinge of pain. It hurt Joseph Briar to smile.

Alfie knew they would not be disturbed by Joseph’s blind grandmother, sitting in her rocking chair by the kitchen hearth. Joseph’s hands gripped the window ledge as he looked up at Alfie Johns in front of him. His face traceable as a map.

One of Alfie’s neighbours always arrived with a story of the war or the womb to leave in Bertha Johns’ ear. He recalled her, now, whispering about Joseph Briar’s forty-year-old mother, too weak with pain to cry out, only whimpering the morning Joseph was born. Isla Jones felt the swell of her daughter at her feet and knew instinctively what her blind hands would have to do. The womb cast Joseph Briar out into the world two months too early, like someone who had defaulted on his rent.

Rosie Briar was hard on death. She defied it and her child lived. She wrapped Joseph in cotton batting and placed him on the oven door in a shoebox from Eaton’s. No doctor was ever called. Joseph lived in an oven womb for months. Joseph’s father was out in the field with Arthur and Anntell when his second son arrived. He didn’t expect the child to live beyond the day. Perhaps that’s what the sixty-one-year-old Duncan Briar wished for his youngest son: death in a shoebox. The child would be an embarrassment if it lived; the village would look down on Duncan, would mock him for having an erection at his age, and its result amounting to nothing more than this bird-like specimen. So he kept Joseph hidden, and forbade his wife and mother-in-law to reveal his existence.

Alfie Johns heard a different story about the child leaking out to schoolboys in recess circles. In hushed tones, Arthur told about the circus boy his mother had rescued from the mainland in Nova Scotia. How she brazenly opened the tent and retrieved the freak boy, whom she felt was mistreated, while his caretakers were swallowing fire on the main stage. She wrapped him in a sweater and took him home. Arthur never mentioned the role Joseph played in the circus, but he began to let them see the freak for themselves, to take reservations. Only four at a time were allowed to see the boy.

Curiosity is more powerful than any secret. Duncan Briar was wrong to believe his other son would be frightened into silence. Locked in that dangerous space between being clumsy and being unloved, Arthur Briar craved attention. His path of destruction left footprints early. Arthur was not sure if his brother Joseph even recognized his name. He tried to get him to repeat it. Arthur, my name is Arthur. I know you have it hidden away somewhere, Joseph. Can you say Ar…thur? He wanted to hear the sound of Joseph’s voice. Joseph looked up at him. His eyes soulful as his small hand touched Arthur’s mouth in search of the word.

They came together on Sunday mornings at his father’s insistence—his mother, his sister, and himself—for their souls’ weekly maintenance. The blind and the breakable were beyond repair, and so beyond salvation, according to Duncan Briar. They remained behind closed doors as the others piled into Duncan’s shiny Ford Coupe. Isla, Rosie’s mother, kept her ear to any unusual sounds from Joseph’s room. This was the day of the week that Arthur hated his father most, his commands and his fucking rules. He knew his father went to see, and hear about, his generous donations to the church. And since Arthur refused to pray for anything (he was positive that none of his family did either), he always referred to Sunday as the Coupe Loop.

Anntell Briar walked on ahead of the others as if she had been redirected by a slice of wind. She preferred her own space. She resisted conversation with anyone. She blocked out all sermons. She was reading The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and was quite taken by the advantages that might be available to her beautiful mother had she had the courage of Hester Prynne. There was something about adultery that intrigued Anntell. She would never marry an older man as her mother had, whatever the circumstances. Old men dulled the best part of fiction, she boasted to a bewildered English teacher one afternoon, in a contemptuous rapture of adolescent knowledge.

Rosie Briar walked with a slight limp, her leg twisted by childhood polio. At fifty-one, she wore her brace for safety’s sake. Sometimes, she even forgot about it; it followed behind her like a harmless stalker, an invisible displeasure, until she looked down.

Duncan Briar, cruel and haunted, moved slowly through the crowd of people gathered at the front of the church. He was a heavy-set man who made his money early in life, and kept it to his advantage. He owned the Briar Mill, but paid someone else to run it. At seventy-one years of age, the retired shipbuilder was still in touch with the local, national, and worldly politics of the day. He was well educated and proud, and kept his dialogue to a few sentences around his peers. When he was thirty-seven, Duncan Briar had hired the beautiful young Rosie Jones to care for his ailing mother’s personal needs, and married her shortly after his mother’s death. Being twenty years older than his wife, he didn’t carry what he considered the knots of a long marriage like an old ship. His wife still looked fresh to him, his anchor he could cast at any time.

Arthur watched his mother climb the church steps between the peals of the bell on Sunday mornings. A slow delight of the muscles in her soft legs resembled a dancer’s. He watched them ripple, lap against each delicate bone in her smooth flesh. Each step deliberate and defiant as her feet touched the wooden steps. She turned and took Arthur by the arm as he escorted her to the front pew. She had not come here for a miracle. It had already arrived for her, and the only peal that held her attention at the moment came from the beat of a small drum she longed to get back home to hear.

Alfie Johns checked his watch. The Briars would be home in another ten minutes or so. Joseph watched his every movement and had settled himself on the floor in front of the window in a sitting position now. Alfie spoke softly to him.

My name is Alfie.

Joseph grinned up at him.

Would you like me to play another tune for you?

The boy lifted his right hand as if he were about to ask a question. Alfie played a lively jig as he watched the child’s face light up. His hands trembled in the air, a delicate image of a dying bird in a wooden cage.

Did you like that tune, Joseph? Alfie held up his mouth organ for the child to see, and ran it against his mouth to show him where the music came from.

Joseph folded his small hands over and over, as if shuffling a deck of cards. He must have been half the weight of an average twelve year old. His skin, a pale river blue despite the heat of the day; he resembled an exotic bird that had emerged from cool water and nestled in a deep clearing. It was obvious he loved company.

Alfie studied the boy’s face and wondered what had kept him alive for a dozen years. He hated the appellation slow applied to any human being. Slow to what? Die? The boy was happy with his own sounds. He had the gifts of touch and of sight and of hearing; he was able to move his muscles painfully into what everyone else in his family sought, the illusions or delusions of happiness.

You do understand me, don’t you, Joseph? Alfie’s words were drowned in the dark pools of Joseph’s eyes.

I will come back to visit you. We can watch the birds.

The child stared up at him, a knowing look on his face.

I know, said his eyes, I know.

Alfie touched Joseph lightly on the head as he pulled himself up to the window ledge. He felt sure the boy was loved dearly by his mother, and that whatever condition he had could afflict anyone’s child. It had to be Duncan Briar’s idea to keep the child out of sight. He had seen the man in the village, an imposing breath of anger seething between his lips when he spoke.

A heavy rain fell as Alfie made his way home. He clutched his hand firmly shut into an angry fist as he stumbled into the dents in the road the rain created.

2

THE FACE OF the hidden child of Rocky Point kept Alfie restless. What had he really expected to see on that first Sunday visit? Certainly not a real child concealed in wood. Arthur may have constructed a dummy hidden behind a mask, he thought, and had a great laugh at the expense of others. It was something Arthur was capable of doing for a laugh. That was what he had expected to see when he decided to check the place out when the Briars went to church.

Alfie wanted to preserve everything about Joseph Briar, now that he knew a real child existed within the Briar walls. He took his camera on his second visit the following Sunday. He wanted to keep Joseph close to him, at his drum, squatting on the planks. His pain-smeared smile. His broken steps as he approached the geraniums and the stranger with the music and the strange object in his hand that